Since releasing the first Radeon HD 5000 serial graphics card some iv months ago, AMD has continued its set on on Nvidia with an army of new models. Following the Radeon Hd 5870 came the 5850, 5770, 5750, 5970 and most recently the 5670, while today withal another new product is set to make its first advent.

The new Radeon HD 5450, code-named Cedar Pro, will be the well-nigh affordable graphics card belonging to the HD 5000 series. This is likewise the first on AMD'south latest wave of graphics products to do away with GDDR5 memory, replacing it with older GDDR3. Naturally, the Radeon HD 5450 is not designed exclusively for 3D gaming and certain versions will support advanced features such equally Eyefinity.

The Radeon Hd 5450 is stepping in to supervene upon the Radeon HD 4350 graphics card which currently retails for as little equally $35 - $40 (512MB) and $45 - $50 (1GB). AMD expects to ask between $50 - 60 for the new Hard disk 5450, but we believe those prices should settle downwardly a piffling closer to the levels of the older HD 4350 when old inventory is depleted.

To requite you some background information on this budget-minded price point, with the Radeon HD 4350 you basically go what you pay for, pregnant this production carries a number of weaknesses. First is that the GPU is limited to a 64-bit wide retentiveness bus, combined with low frequency DDR2 memory and y'all get a theoretical memory bandwidth of merely 8GB/s. To give y'all can idea of how petty bandwidth that is, back in 2001 the Radeon 7500 had 7.4GB/south of bandwidth at its disposal, while the Radeon 9700 Pro which followed in 2002 using the AGP bus accomplished a memory bandwidth of 19.8GB/s using original DDR memory. Therefore it's difficult to get excited when we tell you lot that the new Radeon HD 5450 has a retention bandwidth of just 12.8GB/south.

Opposing the 16 month old Radeon HD 4350 is the GeForce 9400 GT and GeForce 210 graphics cards, the latter almost being a rebadged 9400 GT simply manufactured using a 40nm pattern process.

What is important to note is that the GeForce 210 utilizes a 64-bit memory bus across all models and supports either DDR2 or DDR3 memory. The faster DDR3 cards have the exact memory bandwidth as the new Radeon Hard disk 5450, which should brand for an interesting head to head comparison. But before we first comparing functioning let's have a closer look at ATI's latest upkeep GPU offering.